Two views

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Two views is a novel by Uwe Johnson from 1965. From the perspective of two young people, a West German photographer and an East Berlin nurse, the story is told about the building of the Wall and its consequences.

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In August 1961 the foreign sports car was stolen from the 25-year-old press photographer Mr. B. from Holstein in West Berlin. The tall, stiff B. with the plump face stays in Berlin to look for the missing car. In addition, he takes photos of the newly erected Berlin Wall and wants to look out for the almost 21-year-old East Berlin nurse D. B. had started a one-week relationship with her in January. The mother, who lives in Potsdam, doesn't understand why the daughter stayed in East Berlin after the East German state denied her access to medical school. The deceased father, a former senior Wehrmacht officer, is considered a war criminal.

D. sometimes went to West Berlin pharmacies and East Berlin doctors brought western medicines with them. When an opportunity to flee to the West presents itself, she does not use it because she feels responsible for her younger brother. In addition, the relationship that started with B. is encumbered by disputes affecting political views. D. considers B., who served in the Bundeswehr , to be politically ignorant.

The police summons B. A son of wealthy parents from Württemberg had stolen B's car. The attempt to kidnap the East Berlin fiancée to the west had come to an end at the barrier with total vehicle damage. The parents of the hot spur compensate B. with an equivalent amount of money.

D's younger brother fled to Bavaria, but could not study there, but became a handyman on the construction site. Now D. wants to leave East Germany. She informs B. of her intention to flee, but makes an escape route a condition on which no shots are fired. B. wants to “help out” D. Although he no longer dares to cross the border, he gives escape helpers 500 marks and gets a brand-new car in Stuttgart. With this he wants to impress D. in the West.

D., masked as an Austrian tourist, flees via Copenhagen and goes to B's bedside. B., overworked by the transfer of his new automobile, ran into a bus as a pedestrian. The sick man proposes marriage to his East German girlfriend. D. wants to think about it. She doesn't think much of Holstein. It has to be West Berlin.

Self-testimony

In the reference Uwe Johnson: Information and Agreements on "Two Views" at the bottom of this article, the subtitle mentions the interviewer Mike S. Schoelman. Neumann claims that the German-American Schoelman does not even exist and that Johnson invented everything.

So here Johnson's "answers": Features of the Romeo and Juliet material can be enumerated. For example, the family feud only appears in a new guise. States instead of families wanted to keep their children.

Compared to other novels by the author, “Zwei Views” is indeed very simple. It is only about a man and a woman whose topoi, activities, worldviews, decisions, etc. are presented strictly separately. The choice of two so-called “simple people” as the only protagonists now fits into this concept. Because they are representative of the everyday needs of the people. In this context, Johnson avoided choosing Rolex watch wearers (H. Böll) as characters in his stories.

shape

Johnson left out the quotation marks in the verbatim speech. D. lets speak unkempt German. For example, she says “nu” (now), “nich” (not), “genuch” (enough), “de” (you) and “stay” (you stay). Sometimes the narrator treads short side paths that can be interpreted as chatter on the topic. If the narrator wants to teach the reader what mediocrity his two protagonists are, he takes other people out of thin air as comparators who are said to have been much better.

Johnson's German is sometimes not one. He writes: “It took her weeks to write three sentences before all the words were correct, so that B. hopefully couldn't help but understand, so that none of them put on her too much.” Or: “She noticed that she was moving, she was but away from itself. ”And there is talk of a messed up order and disgruntled officials. The bitch Henriette squeals. With Wruke, however, a good dictionary next to the reading lamp can help. By and large, D. is portrayed as a nurse who is committed to Humanitas. When it comes down to a “single room to pamper”, the reader is taken aback and thinks of a bad joke.

At the very end of the text, the narrator steps in front of the ramp twice in a row, following the motto: I was there. Once he claims to have stood next to the bus in B's above-mentioned traffic accident and then D. told him everything - under the seal of secrecy. That's not all of the ridiculousness. Probably the reader should slap his thigh with laughter as the narrator deals with names. Even if it's not about B. or D., not a single person is given a name, but a bitch is called by name: Henriette.

Extremely rare, but unheard of in the background, there is “the word about the unification of the remaining German areas”.

According to Hoppe, the narrator remains in the external; so avoid something like the inner monologue. Durzak quotes D. Migner, who suspects that Johnson had resorted to the primitive form because (for example after Achim ) the unmanageability would have been criticized. Here now a narrator who does not know everything reports alternately from the point of view of B. and D. So the reader would be offered “Two Views of Reality”, allegories, as it were, of two German states that exist side by side. While B.'s worldview was determined by the FRG consumer ideology and he stylized D. into a fantasy creature, D. other values ​​dominated; the work for the benefit of society and the "help for the neighbor". Due to Johnson's excessive objectivity - for example in the depiction of the escape - the artistic textual form suffers.

reception

  • Alewyn cannot get over the fact that sluggishness in language (as it was heard at the beginning of the Form chapter , see above) is also rewarded with the most exquisite prizes imaginable. As a result, he subjects strange example sentences to a relentless analysis and shows in particular Johnson's uncertainty: If the author, with his sometimes very daring syntactic constructions, strays too far from understandable sentence statements and forces him to read over the obvious cinnabar in a good-natured way, he pushes an "explanation" to be on the safe side. to. In the same issue of the daily newspaper mentioned below, Kaiser discusses Alewyn's squabbling and would like to prove - just as pennibel as the previous speaker - that there was no slouching at all. In his attack, Kaiser pretends he has nothing against Alewyn. Werner Betz agrees with Alewyn and opposes Kaiser.
  • Johnson certainly processed his girlfriend Elisabeth Schmidt's flight to the West. The novel is dedicated to the escape helpers Bernt and Sonja Richter from the Girrmann group . Neumann explores the autobiographical elements, showing, for example, that Manfred Bierwisch also appears in the novel. The text approaches journalism. Neumann constructs a reference to the nouveau roman : Alain Robbe-Grillet's Le voyeur .
  • Grambow calls Johnson's attempts to explain the names B. and D. Of course, these efforts achieved the opposite with the malicious journalists. The perplexed but resourceful reader had taken a liking to the interpretation of the FRG for B. and the GDR for D. and called an angry Uwe Johnson onto the scene.
  • Golisch feels bored. Johnson always tells the same story. The reviewer presents the lack of reflection as a flaw. Like every reviewer, Hanuschek also deals with the two “simple people”. He lists the fuzzy thinking as well as the lack of strength to strictly analyze the two main characters and calls the allegation of simplicity, this unanimously defining stamp of his colleagues, silly.
  • Jahn and colleagues discover a common feature in Johnson's work - the breaking up of the narrative order. If Johnson really and thoroughly succeeded in doing something, it is this creation of disorder just mentioned. Adorno is one of Johnson's thought leaders. Johnson shows that rapprochement between people in East and West always affects the individual. The failure of love between B. and D. has nothing to do with politics. The cause are the fundamentally different characters. Bernard Larsson and his illustrated book could have been models for the figure of B. Missing time references robbed the reader of orientation. To make matters worse, the storytelling about B. and D. shows no differences. Jahn and co-workers - benevolently - take that as a punchline, incomprehensibly. Jahn praises that the text is both detailed and distant at the same time.
  • If Günter Grass had had something to say, the book would have been called Königskinder . The more recent literary historiography speaks of a "linearly told love story", but the fable has very little to do with love.
  • Hoppe writes that Uwe Johnson did not want Günter Blöcker's word about the “poet of the two Germanys ” - in relation to himself - not. One could assume, Hoppe continues, that the text only describes the GDR, not the FRG. Hoppe certifies the author's objectivity. Johnson had shown neither sympathy for the GDR nor for the FRG in West Germany. Thus predestined to deal with the German question in a de-dramatized form, follow the sparse form and the succinct language of the "two views". The text is by no means simple-minded, but - on the contrary - ambiguous, polyphonic and thus modern. The novel must be received not only literarily, but also culturally. Hoppe imagines it this way: By turning away from B., she thinks back and steers - in cultural-political terms - towards a New Ostpolitik . Johnson had prepared the German reunification “thoroughly and patiently” at the time. D. is in the literature on the subject of "Escape from the GDR" as a happy refugee, lonely there. Hoppe praises the novel as an outstanding text that describes the construction of the wall and subsequent attempts to escape in a literarily acceptable manner. Johnson presented an accurate picture of Germany being broken in two. The choice of the wall photographer B. is media criticism: The listing of banal images flattens the cultural landscape unbearably

literature

Text output

First edition and used edition

  • Two views. 243 pages, linen. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1965

Secondary literature

  • Uwe Johnson: Information and agreements on "Two Views" . Pp. 219–222 (from: Dichten und Trachten , 1965, No. XXVI, pp. 5–10) in: Rainer Gerlach (ed.), Matthias Richter (ed.): Uwe Johnson . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1984 (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 2061), ISBN 3-518-38561-5
  • Manfred Durzak: Political inventory: “Two views” . P. 223–237 (from: Durzak: The German novel of the present. Böll . Grass. Johnson. Wolf . Stuttgart 1979) in: ibid
  • Richard Alewyn : A material test . Pp. 238–247 (from: Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 28, 1971) in: ibid
  • Joachim Kaiser : Review of a review . Pp. 248-251 (from: Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 28, 1971) in: ibid
  • Wilfried Barner (ed.): History of German literature. Volume 12: History of German Literature from 1945 to the Present . CH Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-406-38660-1
  • Sven Hanuschek: Uwe Johnson . Morgenbuch Verlag, Berlin 1994 (1st edition, Heads of the 20th Century, Vol. 124), ISBN 3-371-00391-4
  • Stefanie Golisch : Uwe Johnson for an introduction. Junius. Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-88506-898-2
  • Bernd Neumann: Uwe Johnson. European Publishing House, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-434-50051-0 . Pp. 445-454, pp. 512-538
  • Jürgen Grambow : Uwe Johnson . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1997 (2000 edition), ISBN 3-499-50445-6
  • Rainer Benjamin Hoppe: Two views. About Uwe Johnson's picture of Germany. In: Jan Badewien (Ed.), Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann (Ed.): Assumptions about Uwe Johnson. Home as a spiritual landscape. Herrenalber Forum Vol. 43, Bad Herrenalb 2004, ISBN 3-89674-544-1 (© Evangelische Akademie Baden, Karlsruhe 2005), pp. 80-103.
  • Kristin Jahn: “Vertell, vertell. You smile so beautifully. ”Uwe Johnson's poetics between claim and reality . Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-8253-5146-7 . Pp. 183-230

Remarks

  1. ↑ Hoppe (Hoppe, p. 101 below - 102 above) cannot reject the allegory thought either. While B. was still hoping for love at the end of the novel, D. said goodbye to this idea after her arrival in Germany and went her own way.
  2. ↑ Grambow is in good company with other name researchers. Hanuschek (p. 61, 14. Zvo), for example, who does not want to take the name theater seriously, suspects the photographer's name is Dietbert Ballhusen and the nurse Beate Dusenschön.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Neumann, p. 530, 9th Zvu
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 124, 6th Zvu
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 181, 3rd Zvu
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 127, from 8. Zvu
  5. ↑ for example the edition used, p. 146, 2. Zvo
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 194, 10. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 224, 14. Zvo
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 89, 3rd Zvu
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 98, 2nd Zvu
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 166, 2nd Zvu
  11. ↑ Edition used, p. 97, 11. Zvo
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 117, 9. Zvu
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 239, 4th Zvu
  14. ↑ Edition used, p. 242, 10th Zvu
  15. ↑ Edition used, p. 163, 1. Zvu
  16. ↑ Edition used, p. 208, 11. Zvu
  17. ↑ Hoppe, p. 94 below
  18. ^ Kaiser, p. 251, 5th Zvu
  19. ^ Neumann, p. 450 below and p. 525 below
  20. ^ Neumann, p. 453 middle
  21. ^ Neumann, p. 528, 7th Zvu
  22. ↑ Neumann, pp 536-538
  23. ↑ Grambow, pp. 76 and 78
  24. ↑ Golisch, p. 64 below
  25. ↑ Golisch, p. 64 middle
  26. ↑ Hanuschek, p. 60, 14th Zvu
  27. ↑ Jahn, p. 351, 10. Zvo
  28. ↑ Jahn, p. 227 below and 230, 9th Zvu
  29. ↑ Jahn, p. 230 middle
  30. ↑ Jahn, p. 229, below
  31. ↑ Jahn, p. 215 below
  32. ↑ Jahn, p. 189 below
  33. ↑ Jahn, p. 209 middle
  34. ↑ Jahn, p. 214 above
  35. ^ Neumann, p. 532, 7th Zvu
  36. ↑ Barner and co-workers, p. 409, 7th Zvu
  37. ↑ Hoppe, p. 92, 6th Zvu
  38. ↑ Hoppe, p. 80, 4. Zvo
  39. ↑ Hoppe, p. 82, 5th Zvu
  40. ↑ Hoppe, p. 86, above
  41. ↑ Hoppe, p. 86, middle
  42. ↑ Hoppe, p. 81, 1. Zvo
  43. ↑ Hoppe, p. 89, below
  44. ↑ Hoppe, p. 102, 17. Zvo
  45. ↑ Hoppe, p. 103, 3. Zvo
  46. ↑ Hoppe, p. 92, 2nd Zvu
  47. ↑ Hoppe, p. 93, 12. Zvo
  48. ↑ Hoppe, p. 93 middle - 93 below
  49. ↑ Hoppe, p. 101, 10. Zvo